Students will rise to the level of expectations

One year ago, my team and I began to transform the Houston Independent School District, the 8th largest school district in the United States.  While HISD can rightfully boast of having some of the best schools in the nation, the  District on the whole was underperforming with 123 of its 274 schools having a D or F accountability rating.   

We knew that we would be engaged in the most important transformational work taking place in education today.  Because piecemeal, incremental reform does not work in this setting, we decided to conduct wholescale, systemic transformation using fundamentally different design principles.  In short, we would need a new education system.  But the systems problem we faced was how to conduct wholescale systemic reform in an underperforming and highly decentralized school district with little time to plan – our team had less than three months before the start of the 2023-2024 school year.

Toward the end of August 2023, we implemented a new education system (NES) in 85 schools of the District.  How we did it and what it really took is a discussion for another day.  What I would like to report here is that at the end of one year, the NES system is successfully improving student achievement.  The results of the state assessments are in, and HISD students overall demonstrated some of the biggest proficiency gains in the District’s history.  The students in the NES schools grew twice as much as the non-NES schools.

The high school data has been released.  The elementary and middle school data will be released next week.  When those scores are released, one will see reading and math improvement scores that are likely to be the largest overall growth in reading and math in Texas history.

Yes, our students are still behind the state average with regard to proficiency levels.  However, if we can grow at similar rates the next couple of years, we will have closed the gap with the State.   We are also aware that one data set does not make a trend.  Still, the incredible results do show that we are headed in the right direction and that students can and will achieve at high levels with support from exceptional educators and strong systems.  HISD is starting to prove what’s possible for wholescale systemic reform in public education. 

Stay tuned for more information.  Mike